Author: DV Dan

There’s an axiom that says: Roman Catholics tend to adore Mary while Protestants and Evangelicals tend to ignore Mary. Neither is ideal. Mary is pre-eminently the Mother of the poor. Karl Rahner once pointed out that when you look at all the apparitions of Mary that have been officially approved by the church you will notice that she has always appeared to a poor person – a child, an illiterate peasant, a group of children, someone without social standing. She’s never appeared to a theologian in his study, to a pope, or to a millionaire banker. She’s always been the person to whom the poor look.

We see this, for example, very powerfully in the effect that Our Lady of Guadalupe has had on much of Latin America. In all of the Americas, most of the indigenous peoples are now Christian. However, in North America, while most of the indigenous peoples are Christian, Christianity itself is not seen as a native religion, but rather as a religion brought to the native peoples from elsewhere. In Latin America, in every place where Our Lady of Guadalupe is popular, Christianity is seen to be a native religion.

At the wedding feast of Cana, Mary tells her son (who is always divine in John’s Gospel) that “they have no wine”.  In John’s Gospel, this is not just a conversation between Mary and Jesus; but also a conversation between the Mother of Humanity and God. Secondly, as Eve, as universal mother, and as our mother, she stands in helplessness under human pain and within human pain when she stands under the cross. In this, she shows herself as universal mother but also as an example of how injustice must be handled, namely, by standing within it in a way that does not replicate its hatred and violence so as to give it back in kind. Mary offers us a wonderful example, not to be adored or ignored. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Mary of Scripture and the Mary of Devotions” June 2018]

Where does God speak in our world? How does God speak?

Whenever you hear a voice that sounds coercive, threatening, overbearing, that is somehow loud and in your face, you can be sure that, no matter how religious and holy it might claim to be, it is not God’s voice. God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way, but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a way that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence.

God’s voice does judge and it does condemn, but it judges and condemns not by coercive force, but in the same way that the innocence of a baby judges false sophistication, in the way that generosity exposes selfishness, in the way that big-heartedness reveals pettiness, in the way that light makes darkness flee, and in the way that the truth shames lies. God’s voice judges us not by overpowering us but by shining love and light into all those places were we find ourselves huddled in fear, shame, bitterness, hostility, and sin.

We need to view God, always, as non-coercive, as an invitation. This has immense implications for everything to do with church and religion, from how we preach, to how we catechize, to how we do liturgy, to how we reach out to those who don’t share our beliefs, to how we approach divisive moral issues, to how loud we turn up the sound system in our churches. God’s voice is not a loud, coercive, overbearing, threatening voice, one that gets into your face whether you like it or not. Rather, God’s voice invites in, beckons, leaves you free, and is as non-threatening as the innocence and powerlessness of a baby – or a saint. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God’s Voice as Invitation” April 2007]

“…inside each of us there’s a deep place, a virginal center, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is held and guarded. …It’s where we unconsciously remember that once, long before consciousness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than our own. It’s where we still sense the primordial kiss of God.” (“Coping with our own Souls”, Father Ron Rolheiser).

Once in a dream I experienced what could have been that beginning of consciousness. I seemed to come from an unbounded existence like God’s energy. Suddenly I  was confined to a moment, a movement. I rebelled. And I knew sin.

Innocence and sin are a human experience. As a child I remember one hot day in a hay slough when two of my brothers and I stripped off our clothes and climbed a fallen tree that leaned slightly above ground. This was like Adam and Eve before the fall, the innocence of Eden. As Christians we can return to that childhood innocence. Jesus redeems our fallen nature as we pray in the Eucharistic prayer, “Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be made acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus wants to walk with us. “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.” (Matthew 11:28-30). “Walk with me,” Jesus is saying. Learn from me. Be humble as the God who wants to walk with us. Jesus promises us rest and an easier burden. Even our hardest burdens become bearable with Christ’s shoulders taking some of the weight.

We can live in the presence of the Lord, loving others and sharing God’s grace. That is our mandate every Sunday morning as we go forth from our churches to love and serve the Lord. We can choose to accept Jesus as a companion in life. We can share our burdens and our joys with the one who suffered for us. “Come to me,” he invites.[Exceprt from Ken Rolheiser’s “Walking with Jesus”]

One of the marks of a Christian heart is the desire for inclusivity, the desire to ultimately be in communion with as many people as possible, to have everyone in heaven with you without demanding that they become just like you to get there. Sadly, we tend to harbor the opposite attitude, though we are slow to admit this.

Too often we have an unconscious mantra which says: I can only be good, if someone else is bad. I can only be right, if someone else is wrong. My dogma can only be true, if someone else’s is false. My religion can only be right, if someone else’s is wrong. My Eucharist can only be valid, if someone else’s is invalid. And I can only be in heaven, if someone else is in hell.

However, scriptures make it clear that God’s salvific will is universal and that God’s deep, constant, passionate longing is that everyone, absolutely everyone, regardless of their attitude and actions, be somehow brought into the house. God, it seems, does not want to rest until everyone is home, eating at the same table.

This same dynamic holds true for the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to search for the lost sheep. For a Hebrew at that time, the number 99 did not designate wholeness, but the number 100 did. The shepherd is like the mother with the alienated daughter, he cannot rest until his family is once again made whole. We see the same longing, passion, and sadness in the Father of the prodigal son and older brother. He cannot rest, nor be at peace, until both his sons are back in the house. He is overjoyed when his wayward son returns but the story ends with him still outside the house, trying to coax his other son, outside because of anger, to also come inside. His heaven includes both his sons.

Our heaven too must be a wide one. Like the the shepherd who has lost a sheep, and like the father of the prodigal son and older brother, we too shouldn’t rest easy when others are separated from us. The family is only happy when everyone is home.

What ultimately characterizes a genuine faith and a big heart is not how pure our churches, doctrines, and morals might be, but how wide is the embrace of our hearts. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “How Large is your Heaven?” December 2010]

“Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Picture the scene: Jesus has just impressed a crowd and a woman, probably a mother, shouts out: “You must of had a wonderful mother!” Jesus responds something to this effect: “Yes, I had a wonderful mother, though in ways you don’t imagine. She was wonderful not because she gave me biological birth, all mothers do that. What made her a great mother is that she gave me birth in the faith.”

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary which acknowledges the long-held belief that Mary was preserved from original sin from the moment of her conception, a foundational mystery of salvation.

Pope Pius IX in 1854 defined the dogma of the “Immaculate Conception of Mary” to codify the centuries of belief, from scripture passage like “Hail, full of grace” and writings from the early Church Fathers who called Mary “spotless” and “immaculate.”

Mary is the ultimate disciple, one who fully cooperated with God’s grace, and whose life helps us understand our own calling to give flesh to faith. Mary, too, needed Jesus as her Savior, but her preservation from sin from the first instant (the Immaculate Conception) was a unique work of God’s grace, not something she merited.

The Immaculate Conception isn’t just about Mary; it’s a sign for us that God wants us to be holy, to be filled with His grace, and to overcome the “immaculate deceptions” of our own pride and ego.

Mary’s Immaculate Conception provides profound hope and a vision of what God intends for humanity—a pure vessel to bring Christ into the world, echoing the Church’s universal hope in salvation.{Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Mary as a Model of Faith” December 2003]

There is a Norwegian proverb that reads: Heroism consists of hanging on one minute longer. Scripture teaches much the same thing about moral heroism: In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul ends a long, challenging admonition by stating: You must never grow weary of doing what is right. And in his letter to the Galatians, Paul virtually repeats the Norwegian proverb: Let us not become weary of doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

Mature Christians put up with a lot of tension in helping to absorb the immaturities and sins of their churches. Men and women are noble of character precisely when they can walk with patience, respect, graciousness, and forbearance amid crushing and unfair tensions, when they never grow weary of doing what is right.

Of course this comes with a caveat: Carrying tension does not mean carrying abuse. Those of noble character and sanctity of soul challenge abuse rather than enable it through well-intentioned acquiescence. Sometimes, in the name of virtue and loyalty, we are encouraged to absorb abuse, but that is antithetical to what Jesus did. He loved, challenged, and absorbed tension in a way that took away the sins of the world. We know now, thanks to long bitter experience, that, no matter how noble our intention, when we absorb abuse as opposed to challenging it, we don’t take away the sin, we enable it.

But all of this will not be easy. It’s the way of long loneliness, with many temptations to let go and slip away. But, if you persevere and never grown weary of doing what is right, at your funeral, those who knew you will be blessed and grateful that you continued to believe in them even when for a time they had stopped believing in themselves.

Endurance is the ability to keep going when everything in you wants to give up. It’s not just about speed—it’s about stamina. In the Kingdom, finishing matters more than starting. Many begin strong, but few endure until the end. That’s where the power lies. Endurance doesn’t mean you never get tired—it means you don’t quit. It’s powered by grace. Fueled by vision. Encouraged and strengthened by scripture.

There’s a question about God’s goodness as old as religion itself: How can an all-good God send someone to hell for all eternity? How can God be all-merciful and all-loving if there is eternal punishment? It’s a false question. God doesn’t send anyone to hell and God doesn’t deal out eternal punishment. God offers us life and the choice is ours as to whether we accept that or not.

God, Jesus tells us, doesn’t judge anyone. We judge ourselves. God doesn’t create hell and God doesn’t send anyone to hell. But that doesn’t mean that hell doesn’t exist and that it isn’t a possibility for us. Here, in essence, is how Jesus explains this – God sends his life into the world and we can choose that life or reject it. We judge ourselves in making that choice. If we choose life, we are ultimately choosing heaven. If we reject life, we end up living outside of life and that ultimately is hell. But we make that choice, God doesn’t send us anywhere. Moreover, hell is not a positive punishment created by God to make us suffer. Hell is the absence of something, namely, living inside of the life that’s offered to us.

To say all of this is not to say that hell isn’t real or that it isn’t a real possibility for every person. Hell is real, but it isn’t a positive punishment created by God to deal out justice or vengeance or to prove to the hard-hearted and unrepentant that they made a mistake. Hell is the absence of life, of love, of forgiveness, of community, and God doesn’t send anyone there. We can end up there, outside of love and community, but that’s a choice we make if we, culpably, reject these as they are offered to us during our lifetime.

As Jesus tells us in John’s Gospel: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment, the light has come into the world, and the people loved darkness rather than light….I judge no one.”

Hell is the pain and bitterness, the fire, we experience when we culpably put ourselves outside of the community of life. And it is always self-inflicted. It is never imposed by God. God doesn’t deal death and God sends nobody to hell – He doesn’t need to.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “God Judges No One” September 2009]

Faith isn’t something you nail down and possess once and for all. It goes this way: Sometimes you walk on water and sometimes you sink like a stone. Air is free, is everywhere, and our health doesn’t depend upon its presence, for it’s always there, but rather upon the state of our lungs (and mood) at any given moment.

Sometimes we breathe deeply and appreciatively; but, sometimes, for various reasons, we breathe badly, gasp for breath, are out of breath, or are choking for air.  Like breathing, faith too has its modalities.

And so, we need to understand our faith not as a possession or as something we achieve once and for all, which can be lost only by some huge, dramatic, life-changing shift inside of us, where we move from belief to atheism. “Faith isn’t some constant state of belief,” suggests Abraham Heschel, “but rather a sort of faithfulness, a loyalty to the moments when we’ve had faith.”

And that teases out something else: To be real, faith need not be explicitly religious, but can express itself simply in faithfulness, loyalty, and trust. Fox example, in a powerful memoir written as she as dying of cancer, The Bright Hour, Nina Riggs shares her strong, but implicit, faith as she calmly faces her death. Not given to explicit religious faith, she is challenged at one point by a nurse who says to her: “Faith, you gotta have it, and you’re gonna need it!” The comment triggers a reflection on her part about what she does or doesn’t believe in. She comes to peace with the question and her own stake in it with these words: “For me, faith involves staring into the abyss, seeing that it is dark and full of the unknown – and being okay with that.”

We need to trust the unknown, knowing that we will be okay, no matter that on a given day we might feel like we are walking on water or sinking like a stone. Faith is deeper than our feelings.[Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Ups and Downs of Faith” March 2018]

I believe that this is where we are standing today as Christians, on new borders in terms of relating to other religions, not least to our Islamic brothers and sisters. The single most important agenda item for our churches for the next fifty years will be the issue of relating to other religions, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Indigenous Religions in the Americas and Africa, and various forms, old and new, of Paganism and New Age. Simply stated, if all the violence stemming from religious extremism hasn’t woken us yet then we are dangerously asleep.  We have no choice. The world has become one village, one community, one family, and unless we begin to understand and accept each other more deeply we will never be a world at peace.

Jesus makes this abundantly clear most everywhere in his message, and at times makes it uncomfortably explicit: Who are my brothers and sisters? It is those who hear the word of God and keep it. … It is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord, who enter the Kingdom of Heaven but those who do the will of God on earth. Who can deny that many non-Christians do the will of God here on earth?

All religions are to be judged, as Huston Smith submits, by their highest expressions and their saints, not by their perversions. This is true too for Christianity. We hope that others will judge us not by our darkest moments or by the worst acts ever done by Christians in the name of religion, but rather by all the good Christians have done in history and by our saints. We owe that same understanding to other religions, and all of them in their essence and in their best expressions call us to what’s one, good, true, and beautiful – and all of them have produced great saints.

Christian theology (certainly this is true for Roman Catholic theology) has always accepted and proactively taught that the Mystery of Christ is much larger than what can be observed in the visible, historical enfolding of Christianity and the Christian churches in history. Christ is larger than our churches and operates too outside of our churches. He is still telling the church what Jesus once told his mother: “I must be about my Father’s business.”

This may come as a surprise to some but, in fact, the dogmatic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church is that sincere persons in other religions can be saved without becoming Christians, and to teach the contrary is heresy. The God whom Jesus incarnated wills the salvation of all people and is not indifferent to the sincere faith of billions of people throughout thousands of years. We dishonor our faith when we teach anything different. All of us are God’s children. There is in the end only one God and that God is the Father of all of us – and that means all of us, irrespective of religion. [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Standing on New Borders” July 2018]

The phrase “the tattered houses of our lives” is a poetic and metaphorical expression, often used in literature, art, and personal reflection to describe the imperfect, worn, and sometimes damaged nature of our homes, our histories, and our very selves.

What kind of house can you build for me? Men and women of faith have generally taken this literally, and so from ancient times to this very day have built magnificent temples, shrines, churches, and cathedrals to show their faith in God. That’s wonderful, but the invitation Isaiah voices is, first and foremost, about the kind of house we’re meant to build inside ourselves. How do we enshrine the image and likeness of God inside our body, our intellect, our affectivity, our actions? What kind of “church” or “cathedral” is our very person? That’s the deeper question in terms of moral living.

Beyond a very elementary level, our moral decision-making should no longer by guided by the question of right or wrong, is this sinful or not?  Rather it should be guided and motivated by a higher question: What kind of house can you build for me? At what level do I want live out my humanity and my discipleship? Do I want to be more self-serving or more generous? Do I want to be petty or noble?

Allow me a simple, earthy example to illustrate this. Consider the issue of sexual chastity: is masturbation wrong and sinful? I once heard a moral professor take a perspective on this which reflects the challenge of Isaiah. Here, in a paraphrase, is how he framed the issue: “I don’t believe it’s helpful to contextualize this question as did the classical moral theology texts, by saying it’s a grave disorder and seriously sinful. Nor do I believe that it’s helpful to say what our culture and much of contemporary psychology is saying, that it’s morally indifferent.

I believe that a more helpful way to approach this is not to look at it through the prism of right or wrong, sinful or not. Rather, ask yourself this: at what level do I want to live? At what level do I want to carry my chastity, my fidelity, and my honesty? At what point in my life do I want to accept carrying more of the tension that both my discipleship and my humanity ask of me? What kind of person do I want to be? Do I want to be someone who is fully transparent or someone who has hidden goods under the counter? Do I want to live in full sobriety?” What kind of “temple” do I want to be?  What kind of house can I build for God?

This moral choice comes to us, as do all the invitations from God, as an invitation, not as a threat. It’s through love and not threat that God invites us into life and discipleship, always gently asking us: what kind of house can you build for me? [Exerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “What Kind of House Can You Build for Me?” October 202]